log daily traffic on server

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Linux MRTG configuration how-to. However, some user seems to confused with MRTG, most users would like to know – how much traffic actually generated by ADSL/Cable service provider on daily and monthly basis.

MRTG is for network monitoring and it can be use to see how much traffic your server or ADSL router actually generated, however it will not tell you how much megabytes or gigabytes the daily traffic was. For all such home user and people having dedicated single Linux box hosted somewhere remote at IDC/ISP there is a tool called vnStat:

It is a console-base network traffic monitor for Linux (perfect tool for remote Linux box hosted at ISP)

It keeps a log of daily and monthly network traffic for the selected network interface(s).

It collects all data from /proc file system it means normal user can monitor traffic (no need to run vnstat as a root user)